


Lilac Cuttings

by gogollescent



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-15
Updated: 2014-06-15
Packaged: 2018-02-04 16:52:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,375
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1786306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the prompt, "Discworld, Night Watch, something DOES in fact go terribly wrong with the timeline." Sybil takes stock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lilac Cuttings

The man—Keel, Havelock had said his name was—woke up about three hours after Havelock dropped him off.

It was not a process designed to make Sybil more comfortable with his presence in her bedroom. If she had thought about it beforehand, she would probably have guessed him to be one of those disconcerting specimens who, like Havelock himself, snapped tactlessly into higher-level consciousness, complete with a developed sense of self and plans for what they’d be doing that afternoon; but in fact it took him almost five minutes to get his eyes open. And he made such awful faces, eyes-shut, that she expected the sight of pink wall hangings to come as rather an existential relief—but when he _did_ look up at the embroidered canopy over the bed, he gave a low gurgle that was worse than all the faces combined.

"Sybil?" he said, after a moment, turning to meet her anxious gaze.

She wished it surprised her, the fact that he knew her name. She had already found the cigar case among his things. And earlier, of course, when he came running in after curfew and concussed poor Forsythe: he’d called out for her. She would have been none the wiser, if it hadn’t been for him shouting her name.

He wasn’t shouting it now. He sounded tired, disbelieving, neither hopeful nor really afraid. He was the one with the bad concussion, if Havelock could be believed.

"Good morning, Sergeant Keel," she said, in her brightest non-operatic sing-song. "I’m told you’ve had a rather difficult start. It’s almost noon now. Would you like tea? I think we may have a kipper left over from breakfast as well."

Keel sat up, without any regard for either her nerves or the broadsword she had on the side table next to her. Then he groaned and lay back down again very quickly. “Has anyone come looking for me?” he asked the canopy.

"Some palace guards were going round the neighborhood, asking if citizens had seen you. And there was this odd little sweeper, with the most eye-watering orange robes… But don’t worry," said Sybil, feeling oddly cheered. This much she was prepared to answer. "Don’t you worry. We sent them all away."

*

"I don’t think he’s quite right in the head," she told Havelock, later.

Keel had tried to leave the house twice, first through the front door and then through the open window; she would have happily let him, but the palace guards were quite transparently still lurking beneath the garden wall, and besides Havelock had been very clear about keeping watch. He’d mentioned his aunt, and Sybil had no desire to incur the wrath of Bobbi Meserole.

Keel, after she tripped him with the flat of the broadsword and tied him to the carved headboard, had alternated between staring at her like a child’s sponge-painting of woe—his stubble went up to his temples, it was really astounding—and sneaking unsubtle glances at his cigar-case-containing pocket as though he thought the thing might disappear.

 _To Sam with love from your Sybil._ Sybil, who had never referred to herself as someone’s in her life, would have liked the case to vanish faster, if it was going to. He was a stranger. _She_ was Lord Ramkin’s daughter, Serafine’s preferred chew-toy, Havelock’s—peer, was what he always called her; a Peer of the Realm, he would specify after a pause, as though there were no difference between the realm and his gray person. She tried to be to other people what they believed they needed. But she had never met anybody who appeared to need a Sybil, whole and entire: Sybil described by just her name, and not her relative position.

 _Pity that he’s a ruffian with an eyepatch, twice your age_ , said the dispassionate little voice that usually butted in when she got maudlin. Even at sixteen, Sybil was a conscientious wool-gatherer. If the man upstairs could have read her mind, he would have been reminded of his childhood[1]. In her own way, and despite grotesque wealth, Sybil came down as hard on ‘indulgences’ as any Cockbill Street mother-of-four.

"Snapcase tried to have him killed," was the indulgent reply Havelock gave when she expressed her skepticism. Seated at the least blue chair in the Rather Blue Drawing Room, and with a sprig of lilac tucked incongruously behind one ear—were those _teeth marks_ she saw on its browning stem?—the young Lord Vetinari was a study in contrasts, and it was impossible to tell whether he offered the words as justification or counterargument. Sybil supposed that anyone might behave wildly when in danger of government extermination. She didn’t think, however, that the accepted rash action was to run out and leave one’s safehouse _behind._ Threaten one’s protector to ensure their silence, perhaps. Threaten their dragons, god forbid: Havelock had dragged Keel right past the modified barn, who knew what barbaric ideas he’d gotten? —But not this sullen resistance to things done for his own good.

She’d tried to talk sense into him. It was hard, with him glowering at her through the one dark eye, his expression all helplessness and betrayal; but she’d done her best. She asked, too, if he’d just _tell_ her why he needed so badly to be gone, and she’d explain to her associate. He shook his head. Said, in a voice like great stone wheels turning—It might already be too late.

"I had gathered," she said aloud, helping herself to the tea service. It was a hungry business, hiding fugitives, and besides if she didn’t hurry Havelock would eat them all. He had a knack for holding one’s gaze without blinking while he chewed, so that you hardly noticed when he finished one biscuit and ferried in another. "I’m very much afraid, though, that if he keeps trying to evict himself, he’ll be caught anyway."

"No."

"Pardon?"

"They found a body," said Havelock, and for the first time since arriving he looked like a boy who had, as Sybil uncomfortably and quite vaguely understood it, toppled a regime the day before. The wonder in his sky-blue eyes, like a message spelt out by industrious clouds. "In the alley where I took him from. Bigger than him, not fresh, but—it had the eyepatch."

"I don’t understand."

"Nor I." He steepled his fingers in that tiresome way he’d picked up from old Mericet. "There were a few other bodies, too. I suppose I should tell him which of his men are still alive."

"—I’m not sure he’ll care."

He gave her an impatient look. She didn’t, herself, know why she’d said it; it was one of those things you blurted out and then discovered to be true.

"Of course he cares. I told you, he’s not an ordinary man. He’s a leader, and that means…"

Sybil pretended to listen to the rest of the speech. She was thinking about the way Keel looked at her, or through her, as though she wasn’t quite real, though not illusory enough to ignore. What made it different from how everyone looked at her was that he seemed to be trying to forget it; he would focus his glare, and shake his head, and then lapse back into doubts. And he gave the same treatment to the bedposts. No, Havelock was right, he would care who had died—but she suspected he already knew.

"If nothing else," Havelock muttered, "I should tell him about Vimes. His protege," he added, at her look. "Or he was. I have no idea why. A sort of noodle in uniform." His face was pensive. "I wonder how many I could have saved."

If he’d stayed. But he’d been busy. Pulling Keel out of the chaos, and then out of the alley altogether. When Keel wouldn’t budge at persuasion, he’d used a blunter instrument, wrangled the inert mass into a cart…

 _And why not stay?_ Sybil almost asked. _If he wasn’t going._ She didn’t see why—other men had to die, while Havelock wheeled “Sam” away like a sack of unsettling potatoes. Together, Sybil didn’t see any reason they couldn’t have _won._

[1] A much more recent event than Sybil envisioned, though only on the adjusted timeline.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Lilac Cuttings](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13068186) by [GoLBPodfics (digiella)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/digiella/pseuds/GoLBPodfics)




End file.
